Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. — Don Marquis

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Author: Don Marquis

Insight: There's something both funny and strangely honest about this image. A rose petal disappearing into vastness, hoping for some sound back. Marquis isn't being cynical exactly—he's naming something poets already know but rarely say out loud: the odds are brutal. You pour yourself into something beautiful and specific, and the world is so enormous and distracted that your voice might just vanish into the noise. But here's what makes this stick: it captures a universal tension, not just about poetry. Anytime you put something genuinely yours into the world—a song, a business idea, a carefully written email, a joke at a party—you're throwing that petal into a canyon. You never know what echoes back, or if anything does at all. Most of the time, nothing does. The silence is real. And yet people keep doing it anyway. Maybe that's the quietest kind of courage: making something and sending it out not because you're guaranteed an audience or vindication, but because the act of creation matters to you regardless. The echo would be nice. But you throw the petal anyway.